Temperature Effect on Mechanical Properties of Top Neck Mollusk Shells Nano-Composite by Molecular Dynamics Simulations and Nano-Indentation Experiments

Abstract

Discovering the mechanical properties of biological composite structures at the Nano-scale is much interesting today. Top Neck mollusk shells are amongst biomaterials Nano-Composite that their layered structures are composed of organic and inorganic materials. Since the Nano indentation process is known as an efficient method to determine mechanical properties like elastic modulus and hardness in small-scale, so, due to some limitation of considering all peripheral parameters; particular simulations of temperature effect on the atomic scale are considerable. The present paper provides a molecular dynamics approach for modeling the Nano-Indentation mechanism with three types of pyramids, cubic and spherical indenters at different temperatures of 173, 273, 300 and 373<em>K</em>. Based on load-indentation depth diagrams and Oliver-Far equations, the findings of the study indicate that results in the weakening bond among the bilateral atoms lead to reduced corresponding harnesses. Whenever, the temperature increases the elastic modulus decrease as well as the related hardness. Moreover, within determining the elastic modulus and hardness, the results obtained from the spherical indenter will have the better consistency with experimental data. This study can be regarded as a novel benchmark study for further researches which tend to consider structural responses of the various Bio-inspired Nano-Composites.